AAA Gaming While Blind

[Music] so hello I'm Karen Stevens the EA Sports accessibility lead my job is is basically trying to help those with disabilities be able to play EA Games this talk is about AAA gaming while blind so basically how blind gamers are playing EA's major titles a little backstory Madden 17 had accessibility features called covered in a talk I gave last year and it covered things like enlarge onfield Graphics which made things twice as big uh twice as wide twice as tall on the field so people with low vision were able to see it at the same time I also um added in brightness and contrast Support also for people with low vision so I wanted to get information back from our Gamers as to how they what they thought of these features and so I created an email account and a Twitter

address just so I could get feedback back from our Gamers and uh I the feedback I got surprised me I'm blind I was able to play past versions of Madden but changes were made to things like the kick meter so now it's hard to play I can't kick the ball yeah I'm like I'm sorry um and also the fact that I didn't realize that we had that many blind Gamers so I went I I reached out and I'm like now thank you for this information um is anybody else here because I found an audio I found it on aiam.com Mission mechanics like basically end up on the ground and they don't know exactly what's going on I'm blind and I can play NHL but I have trouble knowing when the puck is about to hit the ice me

that they have a really hard time getting control of the puck when you first start playing or I'm blind and I'm playing Need for Speed and sometimes I go off the map and get lost that blew my mind to the playing Need for Speed so here's the important thing in all of this I can play they're already playing we already had an audience they were just struggling so that was important to realize that we are ignoring part of our audience and really everyone should be included so how does this even possible I start asking them questions can you explain to me how you're able to play these games I don't understand 3D sound design the more realistic the sound is the better chance they have uh of understanding turns out there's a grain of truth behind Daredevil the the comic book character where they can people can use Echo to determine how far away walls are I had no idea that that was possible but no they really can and uh so when you start putting them in an environment

with 3D sounds all around them like for the person with Need for Speed who was listening for cars you know you wouldn't think of that but it turns out that that's super important to have real 3D sounds U reaction indications so let's say you're on a menu and you hear click click click that's important so they know they know where in the menu they are it's also important when you're like in a fighting game you can actually hear a sound when they hit connects so you get more information menu wrapping so menu wrapping is is when you have like a carousel so you have a bunch of options and when you get to the end of the list it automatically goes back to the beginning if you don't have an indication as to when this wrap happened they have no idea where they are on the list they have no idea when they get back to the beginning so there's two options one don't rrap two add in some sort of feedback Rumble audio doesn't matter so they know that that happened haptic feedback haptic feedback is rumbles it gives you extra Clues and

context as to what's going on it can be used in place of audio in many cases and it helps give weight to different interactions in the game deterministic menus Randomness is is indeed confusing for everyone uh in this case it means that like when you're in a menu you might have uh ads that may or may not show up you may have special promotion modes that may or may not show up which means that your menu will be different sizes things maybe in different locations and if you can't see that's a problem now you may be wondering okay so how are they even coping with what they have already well there is some technology out there that lets them take things like stream video off their counil into a PC and then it uses optical character recognition to read the menus they still have trouble telling where they are but they can actually read some of the information um but it's not a complete thing they uh

are still Laing as to what they're exactly highlighting they they may not be able to tell uh sometimes they use the um OCR technology so they hold they hold up a phone to the screen and it does the same thing as that streaming device but then you have to have a separate step but they are actually able to read some of the menus even if we didn't do anything in the game itself so that's important to realize it also means that the menus as important as it is and really it is important to make it so somebody can read them someone blind can follow them without using software if you make all your menus navigatable but you can't play the game that's not going to help so Matt and NFL how on Earth are they doing this this is one of the games I got contacted about first and it was about somebody who was really frustrated with the new kick meter and I asked him okay so I know you're frustrated with this but what does work for you how how are are you playing this commentary so Madden among

with most of our other sports titles have commentary in it meaning that there is a constant dialogue of everything that's going on it's kind of like listening to a game on the radio where it gives you a bunch of extra information it gives them enough information where they know where their opponents are they know like what yard line they are on the field and they know how many more chances they have to get to the next down which is like 10 yards from the previous yard line um and they know what their team members are doing and they they have some general idea of what's going on just from that it also gives them information on the score now another thing that made it easier for them in Madden is the goal was always to move up the goal you're going towards is always up if you're you you using a stick the AI since there are so many different players on the field the AI Auto Steers for everyone other than the player you're currently controlling you can choose not to take

control of a player meaning it will run for you there also assists so you can do little Dodge moves and things and you don't need to worry about um when to do this so the but the fact is that you always can move up that was probably the most valuable thing because that means they could take over if they wanted to and if a car someone's coming close to them they can feel that because there's haptics when someone's coming about to tackle you and they can you know swirl away you can watch somebody playing these games and you may not even realize they're blind unless they try to kick the ball that was a different story Need for Speed so this is a racing game it's kind of open world the plus side is that if you go off the track usually it'll move you right back on the track like the game itself will move you back on the track so that helps them a lot um realistic sound design sound design matters it matters so much it tells you whether or not you're on dirt you're on pap pavement or what type of surface

you're on you can hear the obstacles going by so they know that like if I hear three whooshes I just went past three posts that type of thing so it gives them enough information in addition to being able to hear the cars I asked them how do you know when to turn while the other cars are turning I turn with them okay that guess that makes sense I never thought of that before engine pitch helps determine speed the engine sounds different depending how fast you're going and how much you're accelerating and they use that in conjunction with the other information to essentially memorize tracks the same way cited people do and then after that they just can go spinning around you know by themselves you're like how is this person doing this well because they used the other cars and figured out the track and figured out all these whooshing sounds and everything and they've essentially memorize the tracks even if they're not intending to controller rumbles were extremely useful to get more feedback it lets them know whether or not they've hit something it also lets them know what type of ground they're on it's it gives you more information than just audio

alone NHL NHL is another Sports title meaning it also has detailed audio such as commentaries and similar to Madden it's a constant dialogue of everything that's happening in addition to that you can hear the other players you can tell when there's a puck being hit and uh it also has a feature where you can set the camera to be a fixed angle so similar to Madden your goal is to go up and this helps them know where they are now the question becomes okay that's great but how do they know when to shoot well it turns out there's assist of aiming in the game you can turn on and it helps you aim your shots so as long as they know that they're relatively close to the end of the field they can try taking a shot it's not as good as an experience as someone with sight but it is an experience and having an experience is the most important thing

for UFC the com they have a commentary as well just like the other sports titles and it gives you more information as to what the other player is doing what blew my mind is the the person who contacted me about this game he's like yeah I I beat the UFC 2 Championship I'm like you what yeah I beat the whole thing okay for putting this in context I think it took me eight hours to beat the first round in that game and they finished the championship I'm like can you give me tips I can't play this game so it just shows you that I asked him how did he do this he spent months trying to figure it out where he's like well there's certain audio things that happen after certain Rumble things that happen then I know if I do the following then it works and he got to the point where he was able then to explain to other blind Gamers and teach them how to play the game so we had a reasonably sized blind Gaming Community for UFC 2 so the trial and error really helped but

that's still rather painful um we like to give them more information so support improvements soliciting feedback is important very important one thing I don't have in this slide but do have later but I will say now Audi games.net all one word is a blind community and they play games and they have a forum and that's one of the top ways I've gotten information is by working on their forum and if you go there and look for me you'll find the entire conversation of all this including all the um questions of what games are you playing and how are you doing this it's all there so but soliciting feedback is key because our titles do release many of them yearly or by yearly relatively often so it gives us opportunities to add more information every single time now unfortunately because because this these games all

have a long history we're not able to necessarily do it from scratch the time really you should be thinking about this is when you're first starting the game it's when you're first starting your design it's cheaper to do it early than it is to do it late that does not mean there isn't value in doing it late so with the r games sometimes we do it in patches that's okay and keep in mind it's not about a Competitive Gaming experience this is about people playing with friends playing with their parents children I've gotten emails from like a blind parent in the UK who wanted a game he could play with his 5-year-old son and he was able to play Madam that's the type of thing we're going for yes it would be wonderful if they could have the same experience as a competitive gamer but it'd be wonderful if they just had an experience and really that's the most important thing so Madden NFL 18 we did add new features to Madden NFL for specifically

these problems what you see here is a picture I used when pitching this to the executives as to how we're going to fix the game or how we could fix the game the white boxes represent the areas I added Rumble so we have this little line that starts at the bottom it goes sliding up to the top and then it comes back down again the when it goes up to the top that's when you determine your power and when of the how hard you kick and when it comes back back down you try to line up those the the arrows that determines how accurately you kick now you can see how this could be a problem if you can't see that thing so and it had no audio cues so I went through and uh said okay if we have these different zones and we added a rumble to these um I think we can make it past this point and at the same time also added in extra rumbles so like you don't have to memorize the advanced menus as long as you snap the ball if you feel like a

short single Rumble you know you're in the middle of a pass if you have a long Rumble you know it's a run playay if it's a double Rumble you're looking at a kick meter and then you can expect the two rumbles after that point so from that they don't have to memorize the M the long menus they can some of them still have because they like being able to pick their exact play but they don't have to and that really lowered the barrier to people who are trying to learn the game for the first time keep in mind the people playing this game have never literally never seen football because they're completely blind but they've also often not even heard football so that made it interesting when I also have extra rumbles when the ball is in the air and also when the snap occurs so basically anytime the ball leaves somebody's hands you feel it you know it's happening now if you're wondering why do I keep doing rumbles why am I not doing audio I'm deaf so I'm the one who implemented these features Myself and I I they I they kept talking about it in terms of

audio and I'm like okay I know in order to make this happen it's probably going to be me doing it I need to be able to test this there is no way I'm going to be able to test audio so I thought about it and I'm like okay how about de blind features how do we make this so we can make it so the de blind can play so I added rumbles to everything and I did turn off my monitor and I was still able to get touchdowns and I got points and scores in the game and I could figure out where I was based on patterns like if it's two kick meters in a row I know I just punted the ball and now I'm doing kickoff so I know that now the other team has control I'm going to say it's really hard to play Death blind it is possible but it's very difficult um I would have to write an extensive guide if someone was going to play Death blind but I wouldn't mind doing that if somebody's interested so on top of that once I proved the game could be played I literally blindfolded the gameplay team I got those eclipse glasses you can't

see anything through and I had them all wear these really cool Nifty looking sunglasses that completely blinded them and made them play the game and they were able to play they were like wow this actually works yeah it works pretty well and from there we got past the there is no way a blind person can play Madden yes a blind person can play Madden and they can have have done it too at that point I've had more leverage so I went to the story mode team because last year was the first year M it had a campaign and said hey so blind players can already play the game can we make it so they can play through the campaign what would be the blockers for them they're like well we have these QuickTime events and we don't know we can't we have no information of giving back to them I'm like okay can we make a guide that would help so I got all the information from them to make this guide and at the same time I'm like okay so some things are not going to be able to figure out because of positioning it's going to be hard they might be able to do it we need to make sure they're not

stuck so if they fail a few times in a row they fail forward it does change the dialogue in the game if you do fail forward but it doesn't have an overall impact in the experience and you are able to finish the story and that's really the most important thing is having an experience and blind Gamers have actually gotten to the very end of Madden story mode UFC's new feature UFC also got haptic feedback this was done completely independently of me at first there was a blind gamer who reached out on Twitter to one of the uh devs and then it came back to me that there someone was doing that and I was already the EA accessibility lead so I was just following up to make sure everything was okay and any no one needed anything and this the other devb had already started adding in rumbles so you could tell how far or near you were with your opponent so basically if the right motor rumbles

your opponent is throwing a high strike if it's the left motor it's a low strike tensity tells you how far away you are from the other player and gives you a lot more information as to what's going on now he did this the reason he did Rumble which is really a good reason why I would have done it too even if I could actually hear I would um there's no cost of making an audio file or loading the audio file there's no performance overhead of an audio file rumble's cheap so the fact is cheap made it a really good option now from there I made an accessibility portal this just came out last week this is brand new I before this point all the guides I was saying I was writing were all on Reddit because I had no home for them so I put everything on Reddit even though they didn't have any hyperlinks and to put in perspective the guide from Madden that for the blind is currently over 25 Pages printed long so that's an awful

lot to not have any hyperlinks on but you do what you can and so for example for the what the guide might look like this is a screen cap of the guide that's why the points are a different color is that this is literally the web page our piece of it it tells you this is the manual itself and all the manuals are text based per game that's on the site and it tells you with no pictures exactly what each button is and what it does so you can use that then to communicate back avoid tables if you Nest tables incorrectly or try to do variable lengths it can mess up screen readers avoid tables this is why we have the colons in the format here it is possible to make a table that works well with screen readers it's also very easy to make a mistake so until you get that down avoid tables also make sure you turn on Windows narrator or voice over

if you're using Apple because if you do that you can hear what your web page sounds like and you can find out what you have to do to make it sound the way you want it to so it's important to test this is an example of the text only guide for Madden and explains the base concept of football because keep in mind some of these people have no clue what football is so I remember I had a meeting where with um another member of our team who is we have these employee resource groups I run the accessibility one she runs the one for uh women she's like do you have any idea how hard it is to explain football to women I said I don't know do you have any idea how hard it is to explain football to somebody who's blind she's like good point so but I do give a brief overview of what football is how the teams line up what what the different how to score points and things like that just high level overview so they have some concept

of the game it also gives detailed information on like how to create an Origin account how to sign in for the first time what the setting menus are when you first go through the game and what options are recommended for them it also provides information on how to reset all options so if they make a mistake because Madden still does have some of those revolving menus that are a problem how to reset it so they know where they are and then go from there tedious but at least gets past that we have uh like I said earlier the long shot story mode we have an extremely detailed list of every single thing that happens in Long Shot which I find hilarious because this has been out since the day that um the patch Came live and it also gives information for uh like there's this mode where you have to know all this football knowledge and pick the right things the answers are in the guide but nobody's ever noticed so but um it gives you extremely

detailed information so somebody who has no site at all still has a decent chance of playing and that's really what matters um and at this point you can find those answers anywhere on the web so that's no real secret because that happened last summer so it gives a key by key format as I showed earlier where um it covers every single step now this is also a screen cap from that website where you see that's why it's blue because that's the color of the links in and the button the uh points in uh the website so as you see here on the left stick press right four times then down two times to reach the practice icon press Aid enter practice icon the next menu has three options normal offense only and kickoff for now let's practice kicking press down twice and then a the whole guide reads like that so if you can't see it all and you're having trouble with your screen reader you can still get through and it gives you an idea of what options are there for ufc3 when I went through

and did the same exercise the it's a little more condensed because it shows the way the menu is laid out so there's less of the individual buttons we do have scenarios basically these are use cases we still have use cases for certain things but it's a little less uh think button by button than madens is now I would happily expand it if I'm requested to every single SE in Madden's guide is because it was specifically requested by someone and anytime anyone asked me how to do anything I made a new section by the time I was done I had a 25 pages of guides so this is an ongoing effort um and the basic rule I'm pushing you never can regress you can always go forward so if you have something that's accessible already you must maintain the accessibility if you touch a new something that's you haven't touched in

a while because a lot of these games we do touch uh UI Year from year and things like that but the game itself madens massive so some features stay relatively the same for years at a time when you touch something you must make it better not worse worse is not allowed and if we keep doing that eventually the whole game becomes much much more access accessible and it's already started happening lwh hanging food can quickly unblock large portions of your audience yeah being able to kick the ball is really important in football so um just fixing that helped so many people and really increased uh the number of blind Gamers we have playing ask your audience for its pain points that's probably the most important Point here ask your audience they know what they need they may be playing your games by asking them you can find out what they really need now keep in mind that they sometimes it's easier to make sure you

stay in problem space not solution space you probably all heard that before where to make sure you're solving the right problem because sometimes they'll jump into a solution and really you have to figure out what the core of the problem is but that's a standard design issue I'm sure you're all familiar with that so once again Audi games.net is a great place to meet blind Gamers I highly recommend it and you can see all the conversations I had with them and all the research that went into this presentation is all available there so you can get all that information if you like um additional content for what these guides look like and different descriptions of how you can design your website for blind Gamers go to ea.com the whole site is designed for blind navigation and blind gaming the whole site uses alt tags on everything so it gives you extra information as to what the pictures are and every single widget you can reach every part of if you need to contact me uh my Twitter is EA accessible I do tweet out

every time something new happens in the accessibility area so if you just want to keep up with news that's a good way of doing it uh if I if you have any questions or feedback able ea.com is a great way to reach me and does anyone have any questions first of all she's going to be repeating the questions to me it's cuz I lip read okay um as I told you uh before I'm I come from the mobile industry and EA does mobile games and all all the games that you said like part of them have uh games on mobile uh do you address you know accessibility in any way on mobile repeat that do you address any of like these kind of things on mobile games yes these type of things do happen on mobile games I'm actually going to be looking at our mobile games shortly I started with the console games

simply because I had to start somewhere um I've only been I've actually only been the accessibility lead for six months my positions only existed that long before that point I was a Madden game developer which is why I was able to say please please please let me put this feature in because I was already on the game um but yes no that's very important um there are lots you're welcome to follow me and ask me for information I can give you more information that's mobile specific and talks about gestures and things all right thanks thank you okay well you half answered my question about uh only being in the position for 6 months but um I was wondering what other resources you have in EA accessibility so do you have any QA testers that are disabled with blindness deafness color blindness things like this or are there plans for this I think I personally caught that question so let me try to repeat um the question being is it do we have anybody who's disabled who's helping test or

develop these the answer is yes uh I have a list of developers I made um internally that I I asked people to self-identify if they have any issues so I have a list of everyone who's colorblind in the building that was willing to do that and it happened to cover every single type of color blindness even blue which is like super duper rare I got really lucky so that gave me a really good background in any of this so that helped a lot we have multiple people with macular degeneration in the building which causes a form of low vision and they help too with these so if we have something or I'm like I don't think so and so can see this well instead of me saying that I go hey can you see this and then I send that feedback back to the designer oh another thing that I do and I don't know if I took them out here is that I have low vision goggles I use to better get people to better understand what it means to be accessible so I uh postulate to a management that would you say that

if you're not legally blind you should be able to play our games and the answer was yes I'm like cool all right put these on this is borderline legal blindness if you're wearing these you should still be able to play the game I don't care how close to the screen you are and uh that helped a great deal now this is not a perfect solution same thing with with blindfolding our game developers we don't have a lot of completely blind people to leverage that is true we do have people who are playing our game who are totally blind and I did have blind Gamers come in and demo things with the team cool thank you have you noticed that um adding some of these accessibility features to help blind people has also generally helped because a lot of those haptic feedback things you talk about actually seem like they would be generally useful and generally helpful for just kind of feeling how the game works for anyone May that have you found that the these um these new features for dis what

people have helped just in general with gameplay you have to repeat that again like have you found that these uh new like in um inputs have helped with in general like play yes the these things have helped in general gameplay not just um the uh the intended target audience for example it turns out I found out that deaf Gamers were turning on the haptics because it made them feel like they had more information that it would get from audio so I wasn't intending that that makes sense because I'm deaf and I'm the one who made the thing in the first place you think that would cross my mind but yes no the de the de are using it too thanks hi uh so it you mentioned you have specific rules for new features and stuff like that uh is accessibility part of the official like Pipeline and gating process is accessibility a part of the official pipeline in the gaming is the accessibility part of the official pipeline in the game process G yes for e a sports so the way my role works is I'm

handling taking in feedback and distributing among teams giving examp like giving examples of how things should be fixed to all of EA now for sports I'm more proactive and I actually go out to the game teams even if it means flying across the country and I have them you know think about things at the design phase so it's plan through um that's different though for the sports versus non sports at this time thank you hi thank you very much um just my first question is are a game um uh designed to be played alone or to be played with other people sometimes uh well cited are the games designed to be played alone or with other people at they're designed to the games are are the games designed to be played alone with other people they're designed for both so the the instructions for example of Madden Covers online play as well not just offline play yeah but online player is your alone on your you can play locally

with somebody or you can play online with somebody and when you play locally with someone uh is it disturbing for the other player did you repeat that if you play um online with someone is it disturbing for the other player or distracting I guess um when you turn on those extra haptic feedback it only affects the person who signed into that controller so you can have it turned on the person next to you may not have it turned on so it's optional what about the audio if it's an audio type of thing it would be on for everybody or off from anybody because it comes out of the TV okay yeah but but if you're playing online yeah the person one council could have it on the other council could have it off that's how color blindness works for example for B okay and I have a second question still about playing with cited people um you say the most important thing is to have an an experience not to have the best experience but doesn't it it feels like um you designed um less welld designed game

actually you you shorter the experience you make it um a minor experience for the impaired people I'm sorry yeah sorry I'm sorry for my English it's uh sometimes terrible um it just um I'm a researcher working on auditory display and working on um audio in video game for um impaired people and um my question now is can we design uh equivalent experience for both cited and um blind people was the question can you design an experience that will work for both sided and non-sighted yeah but but in an equivalence that's the whole point is that so you can have a AAA game that you could have somebody play with their friend who's not blind and people with Madden especially at this point are doing that yeah but is is there experience equivalent okay so equivalent

in terms of can you have an experience yes is it a Competitive Gaming experience at this moment no okay just because it says this moment no does not mean that will never be true nor does it mean that'll ever happen um it's but in terms of is it theoretically possible to design something that works equally well with someone who's blind and someone who's not blind I believe it is in term of fun or in terms of performance what she say in term of OB fun or performances in terms of fun or of preference she said well it options are always a good thing I would always advocate for any sort of accessibility feature you have to make it optional okay okay thank you very much M think we need a h we have to wrap up okay because thank you that's okay you can Che everyone who's left we can go to the wrap up room and finish up and you're welcome to ask questions there thank you